Dr. Chad Womack serves as the Senior Director of National STEM Programs and Initiatives at the UNCF.  Through his leadership, UNCF has raised over $100M to support a portfolio of STEM programs that include the Annual HBCU Tech Innovation Summit, UNCF STEM Scholars Program, HBCU CS Academy, HBCU CS/Tech Pathways Initiative, TechVentures and the Ernest E. Just Life Science Institute and Fellowship Program.  The Ernest E. Just Life Science Institute manages fellowship programs that support the career development of African Americans in the life sciences and is dedicated to building research capacity at HBCUs.  Dr. Womack is also the Founding Director of the UNCF STEM Scholars Program, which is a $50M and 10-year commitment from the Fund II Foundation to support academically talented African American high school students pursuing STEM as majors in college and careers in the tech-industry.  In addition, Dr. Womack manages several partnerships with several industry intermediary organizations including PhRMA, BIO and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. 

Prior to joining the UNCF, Dr. Womack led the White House-supported HBCU Startup and Innovation Initiative, which resulted in the launch of the HBCU Innovation, Commercialization and Entrepreneurship initiative at the UNCF.  Dr. Womack has previously served as a member of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economic Development Agency (EDA) National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE) and was a founding member of the DC Mayor’s Innovation and Technology Inclusion Council (ITIC).  More recently, Dr. Womack co-founded CS4Philly – a Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization dedicated to equity and access to high quality computer science education for K12 youth in the City of Philadelphia; and Black Tech Ventures (BTV) as a nonprofit initiative committed to supporting entrepreneurial leadership among African American student and faculty innovators at HBCU alumni in the tech-industry. 

Dr. Womack’s scientific background and training includes being a co-founder and Chief Science Officer of 3GEN Vaccines Inc. – a startup biotechnology company focused on the development of novel gene-based vaccine vectors; and, several postdoctoral research fellowships at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) and the Laboratory of Immunoregulation at the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH); and fellowships at the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Harvard AIDS Institute at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Dr. Womack earned his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the Morehouse School of Medicine and is a proud graduate of Morehouse College where he earned his B.S. degree in Biology with minors in Chemistry and Applied Physics.